After the shellacking the RINO segment of the RNC took last week with Eric Cantor’s defeat, one would think they might get the message that voters are sick to death of the business-as-usual tactics. Sadly it seems – they have not.

We should never again elect a commander-in-chief who will let our troops down like this. It's one thing to fight a war poorly. Lincoln did that without losing his integrity. It's another thing to ask men and women to die because the polls tell you to.

While some might find the story laughable, I personally find it tragic: Don Ennis, an experienced TV news producer was fired from his job, allegedly for performance-related issues, after reappearing as Dawn Stacey Ennis, marking his third gender change since last year.

Crony Capitalism seems to be taking its toll on the Democrat Party… The big question, is whether or not the Republicans will be able to leverage that message for 2014. Conn Carroll, managing editor of Townhall Magazine, joined the show to talk about the pervasive nature of crony-capitalism.

You can’t help but feel for the children, but instinctively know the real beneficiaries of all the “processing” will be the corrupt, fat- cat politicians whose own policies stifle economic growth down there, hence preventing any competition to their crony capitalism.

Unfortunately, this highly affluent woman, who was pulling down in excess of $300,000 for a job in hospital administration before moving into the White House, yet apparently couldn’t devise simple, nutritious menus for her own children without an intervention from the family pediatrician (“Have you considered arugula, Mrs. Obama?”) is now trying to tell an entire nation what to feed the children.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office found its way to the front page by declaring the word "Redskins" was offensive and therefore unworthy of trademark protection under a 1946 law that proscribes trademarks for "immoral, deceptive, or scandalous matter."

?Do you think leftists are the slightest bit troubled by the public's overwhelming opposition to their crusade to force the Washington Redskins to change their name? That was rhetorical; I give you more credit.

“I’m ready for Hillary,” read the bumper stickers in fashionable Georgetown, the swankiest part of Washington, D.C. These messages are juxtaposed with many a
tattered “2012” bumper sticker with the fading Obama logo.

The other day a teacher of a ninth-grade English class at an elite private school in the nation's capital asked students who had transferred from public schools to list the poets they had studied. Several hands shot up, eager to tell.

Legislators who've been dragging their feet on immigration reform hardly need another excuse for doing nothing, but the recent influx of young children across our borders is certainly making things more difficult.

Although news reporting is limited, it conveys a few insights about the fighting. There are no clear battle lines, as in a conventional war. Success is measured in terms of neighborhoods cleared by soldiers on the ground, as in Syria.

Thu, Jun 19, 2014

One of the lessons that Andrew Lampart learned from being on his school’s debate team was to gather facts for both sides of an argument. So last month when his law class was instructed to prepare for a debate on gun control, Andrew went online using the school’s Internet service.

A couple of weeks ago, in the roiling political wake of the growing scandal surrounding the Department of Veterans Affairs, the House of Representatives passed the "Department of Veterans Affairs Management Accountability Act" by a vote of 390-33.

Seattle’s minimum wage will cost thousands of small business owners their livelihood, but that’s OK; because according to the city’s Socialist councilwoman, small business owners are all “very, very wealthy.”

Two and a half years ago, the U.S. pulled every soldier out of a mostly quiet Iraq. In the void, formerly al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists calling themselves "The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" are now tearing apart the country, leaving medieval savagery in their wake.

Were Obama a competent leader, surrounded by competent subordinates, some immediate actions might have included taking all illegals currently in U.S. custody at the border, and shipping them back to Mexico, the country from whose territory they crossed into the United States.

George W. Bush never claimed to be prescient, but here he is in 2007, warning us what would happen if the United States prematurely pulled its troops out of Iraq before Iraqi forces were sufficiently trained, equipped and motivated to defend the country we gave back to them after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

Let's make this clear: Barack Obama is not responsible for the Federal Trademark Trial and Appeal Board's decision to cancel certain trademark protections related to the NFL's Washington Redskins, due to the "disparaging" nature of the word 'Redskins.' But is symbolic of a government so off course that it defies belief.

The largest and most expensive embassy in the world is in Baghdad. President George W. Bush built it in the hope, perhaps the expectation, that before long, it would house envoys to the first democratic American ally in the Arab world. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

We finally got the person responsible for Benghazi. Sure, it only took 16 days to arrest some obscure film maker who had nothing to do with Libya – and it’s now been roughly two years since our ambassador was murdered – but, yeah… We got him.

Hillary Clinton is in trouble. Her problems do not emanate from her legion of critics on the Right. Instead, because she has not spoken with politically correct precision, her traditional allies on the Left are a bit shaken.

?Over at Intercollegiate Review, Carter Skeel writes a short piece on how Self-Ownership is an Illusion. Unsurprisingly, his brief thoughts on moral stewardship and a debt to community are quickly torn to shreds by a handful of libertarian-leaning internet commentators. But Mr. Skeel is on to something, even if he didn't take the time or have the space to flesh it out fully, for self-ownership is indeed a flawed and inaccurate concept. Particularly as it is understood in our current political moment.

The start of the sectarian killings is no surprise, after Grand Ayatollah Sistani's call to arms. However, it foreshadows the darkest possible turn of this fighting: The militias kill civilians indiscriminately.

Wed, Jun 18, 2014

While the Obama administration tortures the Benghazi raid suspect into a false confession that a YouTube video made him attack our embassy, let's review what his "capture" is meant to distract us from.

?This week the Associated Press reported that an audit of the Department of Veterans Affairs showed that more than 57,000 patients are still waiting for initial appointments more than 90 days after requesting them. An additional 64,000 are enrolled, but have never seen a doctor. The audit also found that 13 percent of VA schedulers said their supervisors told them to lie about wait times so they seemed shorter.

?Thousands of Americans will rally in Washington, D.C., at a March for Marriageon Thursday in support of "the simple and beautiful message," to quote Brian Brown, that "marriage between one man and one woman is unique and critical for our society." Brown is president of the National Organization for Marriage, the event's lead sponsor.

Hooray! Higher oil prices! And this hike in prices, of course, will conveniently coincide with increased inflation, stagnating wages, record joblessness, and anemic economic growth. (Haven’t we seen this movie before?)

Ray Kurzweil -- inventor of things like machines that turn text into speech -- has popularized the idea that we are rapidly approaching "the singularity," the point at which machines not only think for themselves but develop intellectually faster than we.

Calls for slavery reparations have returned with the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" in The Atlantic magazine (May 21, 2014). In making his argument, Coates goes through the horrors of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination.

"Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency's tea party controversy." That's the opening sentence of the Associated Press story on the IRS's claim that it lost an unknown number of emails over two years relating to the agency's alleged targeting of political groups hostile to the president.

On Jan. 12, 1991, with 370,000 U.S. troops already deployed near Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, and a U.N. deadline for Saddam Hussein to withdraw from that country only three days away, the U.S. Congress voted on whether to authorize President George H.W. Bush to use force to reverse Iraq's annexation of its neighbor.

The fact that U.S. President Barack Obama is putting hundreds of boots back onto the ground in Iraq to protect American interests is the result of some bad decisions and missed opportunities to correct course. Except that Russian President Vladimir Putin had already staked out the proper course -- and the Obama administration seems intent on turning every action into a political spitball aimed at getting Putin's attention.

The more people learn about Hillary, the less popular she seems to be. Her book is not selling, she’s making more idiotic statements than Joe Biden without a teleprompter, and even the left is starting to call her out on her lies… I’d have to say 2016 isn’t looking too good for Mrs. Clinton.

Buffeted by slow growth and too few jobs, Americans now have to deal with more inflation. In May, consumer prices rose at more than a 4 percent annual pace, and inflation has been heating up the last several months.

If the Iraqi forces do not start putting up a better fight, there might not be time for deal-making to have any effect. A few fast, deadly ISIL forays into Baghdad could panic its population and collapse its defenses.

Increasingly, people across the country are beginning to realize that teachers’ unions are the biggest obstacle to educational reforms that would give millions of children a better education and a fighting chance at a better life.

Tue, Jun 17, 2014

If Idaho Congressman Raul Labrador pulls off the second stunning upset in as many weeks and defeats California Congressman and current House GOP Whip Kevin McCarthy in Thursday's vote to succeed Eric Cantor as the Republican #2 behind House Speaker John Boehner, 10 consequences would flow from that upset that deserve the consideration of every man and woman voting Thursday.

Believing that America will continue to be strong, prosperous and free no matter what we do is just as foolish as believing that a human being will continue to be healthy, happy and free if he consumes nothing but vodka, crack and doughnuts.

The news from Iraq that Islamic terrorists have now taken over cities that American troops liberated during the Iraq war must have left an especially bitter after-taste to Americans who lost a loved one who died taking one of those cities, or to a survivor who came back without an arm or leg, or with other traumas to body or mind.

In 2006, I invited the late General Bill Odom to address my Thursday Congressional luncheon group. Gen. Odom, a former NSA director, called the Iraq war "the greatest strategic disaster in American history," and told the surprised audience that he could not understand why Congress had not impeached the president for pushing this disaster on the United States. History continues to prove the General's assessment absolutely correct.

Last week, I spoke about how President Barack Obama justified his prisoner swap of five senior Taliban leaders for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl by saying former military leaders and presidents, including George Washington, have engaged in prisoner of war exchange, too.

Polls show that most Americans wanted the United States to withdraw from Iraq. Barack Obama did indeed withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, not troubling to negotiate a readily negotiable status of forces agreement that would have left a contingent of American soldiers there.

Some readers have written questioning my series of columns lampooning the lavender graduation at UNC-Wilmington. That is the ceremony where UNCW graduates are given purple cords to show that they are gay and lavender cords to show they approve of homosexuality.

As the Islamic warriors of ISIS rolled down the road from Mosul, John McCain was an echo of French Premier Paul Reynaud, when word reached Paris that Rommel had broken through in the Ardennes: "We are now facing an existential threat to the security of the United States of America," said McCain.

A trial judge in California has now delivered a resounding decision in the great tradition of Brown v. Board of Education -- yes, the case that sounded the death knell for Jim Crow in public schools after half a century of legally established and maintained racial segregation.

Russia is pushing into the Ukraine and threatening Eastern Europe, China is bullying Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam in the East and South China seas, and terrorist groups in the Middle East and Africa can be displaced in one place only to multiply and create more lethal threats in others.

H.L. Mencken, in 1918, observed that “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

The actual security situation is complicated by the need for the government and for ISIL to boast of their military successes. Our comparison of the claims indicates ISIL has stopped about 50 or 60 miles from Baghdad on its two southern axes of advance towards Baghdad.

?No matter what President Obama or members of his administration say regarding the economy, the unvarnished reality remains that the United States continues to suffer through its slowest economic recovery in generations.

?The Obama administration placed its crosshairs right on the coal industry by mandating a 30 percent cut in carbon emissions at fossil fuel-burning power plants by 2030. By attempting to force America to use the most expensive, unreliable energies, wind and solar, the Environmental Protection Agency will be fulfilling its goal of reducing fossil fuel use.

THE GREAT state of Minnesota, you'll be glad to learn, is no longer interested in the size and color of your bug deflector. The legislature in St. Paul recently scrapped the 1953 law regulating that automotive accessory, one of almost 1,200 antiquated or bizarre laws that Governor Mark Dayton recommended repealing as part of a major legislative "unsession." Among other changes: Minnesotans have been liberated from the ban on possessing more than two hen pheasants, the penalty for distributing berries in the wrong-sized container is history, and it is now legal to coast with your car's gears in neutral.

Another fast-moving story overtook Our Nation's Capital this weekend as the Sunni insurgency that invaded and took control of Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, last week and was marching on the capital of Baghdad.

Five teacher hiring and firing laws bit the dust in California this week. In a major blow to teachers unions, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu’s ruling struck down teacher tenure, while freeing districts from spending hundreds of thousands to fire teachers and from having to fire newly-hired teachers first during layoffs.

While Holder and Co have been busy collecting billion dollar fines from big banks, they’ve taken a more direct approach to snub out businesses that don’t necessarily conform with the Holder/Obama view of America.

Louisiana's "Ragin' Cajun,"James Carville, was the mastermind behind the first Clinton presidential campaign. He drew the Republicans off their winning strategy back in 1992 with his “It’s the economy, stupid!”

Just when things seem like they can’t get any worse, Obama stoops to a new all time low. With the resounding defeat of Eric Cantor, liberal ‘Dreamers’ must look for new and creative ways to hoist their illegal, open-border policies upon law-abiding American citizens.

When a kid with cookie all over his face claims he didn’t eat any cookies it’s because he knows he wasn’t supposed to be eating cookies. He’ll eventually fess up, although he may rationalize the behavior. Most adults are the same way. A president with a stain on an intern’s dress may hold out for a while, but he’ll come around eventually.

This isn’t going to be one of those sentimental Father’s Day articles, even though that is what I would prefer. This article will have a bit of an edge to it. Please excuse my bluntness, but fatherhood is serious business, and for me to sugarcoat or evade the truth about it would benefit nobody

Peter Morici is a professor at the University of Maryland Smith School of Business, former Chief Economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission, and five-time winner of the MarketWatch best forecaster award.